History Forum / General / Ancient History / December 2004

Kurt,
I take it that you haven't taken yourself time to look into the
text-critical analyse of the Greek text, well I haven't either since I can't
read Greek,
but I have learnt that there is many thing in the Codex Bezae that needs to
be discussed before any details in text can be refered to as if it's 'true'
text of the Gospels origin forms.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04083a.htm
and many other sites.

Da Vince Code is pure fiction.

Inger E

Here is a review, in The Spectator, of a book about the rubbish on which the
Da Vince Code is based. You might find it of some interest.

 A fiction based on falsehood
Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code
Bart D. Ehrman
OUP, 207pp, £11.99, ISBN 0195181409

Shortly before the publication of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code in Britain,
the publishers, Transworld, kindly sent me an advance copy of the hardback
edition. I glanced through it, recognised the recycled nonsense of the 1980s
bestseller, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and sent it off unread to the
Oxfam shop. It seemed to me unlikely that the public could fall for the same
trick twice. How wrong I was: the novel was rapturously received in the
United States, has sold more than 18 million copies in 42 languages and has
spawned a dozen commentaries - among them The Rough Guide to the Da Vinci
Code and Bart D. Ehrman's Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code.

Bart Ehrman is a serious scholar: he chairs the Department of Religious
Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill but is at pains
to point out that, while this is 'the buckle of the bible belt', he is not a
blinkered, born-again Christian. He rigorously confines himself to his area
of expertise - early Church history - and eschews comment on tangential
aspects of The Da Vinci Code such as the role of Opus Dei or the Templar
Knights.

The so-called 'facts' behind Dan Brown's novel are that Jesus of Nazareth
had a child by his wife Mary Magdalene whose descendants became the Merovin-
gian kings of France. This truth was ruthlessly suppressed by Christ's male
apostles and the early Fathers of the Church.  Apocryphal gospels which give
Mary Magdalene her due were excluded from the New Testament by order of the
Roman Emperor Constantine: instead, Mary Magdalene - the 'divine feminine' -
was demonised as a whore.

However, the truth was preserved by a secret 'Priory of Sion' and the
crusading Knights of the Temple found documents that proved it under the
Temple Mount in Jerusalem. These documents, together with the remains of
Mary Magdalene, are the Holy Grail. Coded allusions to it are found in the
songs of the troubadours and Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting of the Last
Supper. The fictional plot turns on a race in the present day to find the
Grail and reveal it to the world - unless, of course, the crazed assassin of
Opus Dei gets there first.

So far, so good: all is fair in love, war and fiction. But one of the
reasons for the novel's appeal is Dan Brown's claim that much of this is
true. It is to counter those claims that Ehrman was persuaded by his editor
at Oxford University Press to put him right, and he does so patiently,
comprehensively and in the kind of simple, step-by-step style that he no
doubt adopts for his students in North Carolina. Jesus's life was not
recorded by 'thousands of followers'. It is not true that 80 Gospels were
considered for the New Testament, or that Jesus was not considered divine
until the Council of Nicea, or that the Emperor Constantine commissioned 'a
new Bible'.  The equation of Mary Magdalene with the woman of ill-repute in
the Gospels was only made by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th century.
Jewish decorum did not disapprove of celibacy: the Essenes were celibate.
The Dead Sea Scrolls make no reference to Jesus nor do the Nag Hammadi
documents tell the story of the Grail or emphasise Jesus' humanity:  'quite
the contrary'.

To add to Ehrman's catalogue of Brown's disinformation from my area of
expertise (sales of my book The Templars have risen thanks to The Da Vinci
Code) I might add that the Templar church in London, like all Templar
churches, was not 'perfectly circular in honour of the sun' as Sir Leigh
Teabing claims in Brown's novel, but in imitation of the church of the Holy
Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Nor did Pope Clement V kill and inter 'hundreds of
Knights Templar' on 13 October, 1307, burn them at the stake and throw their
bodies 'unceremoniously into the Tiber River'; they were arrested in Paris
and other French cities by King Philip IV of France in defiance of the Pope
who vehemently protested. Nor could the Pope have thrown the bodies into the
Tiber: he was residing in Poitiers at the time.

If so many historical claims made by the characters in The Da Vinci Code are
untrue one is left wondering about its author, Dan Brown. Is he ignorant,
cynical or lazy, or perhaps a bit of all three? No doubt he saw promising
material for a thriller in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail: and no doubt
the story taps today's anti-Catholic prejudice and feminist paranoia. But by
counting on ignorance and gullibility in his readers he implicitly insults
them. With, say, 2.5 readers for every copy of the book (I read my son's
paperback) that makes almost 50 million dupes. Quite an achievement.

Bart Ehrman does not seem to mind.  He is at pains to point out that off
campus he is a regular guy who likes the movies The Last Temptation of
Christ and The Life of Brian 'almost without reserve'. He finds The Da Vinci
Code as a work of fiction 'intricate, compelling, spellbinding' and, perhaps
because he lives in that buckle of the Bible Belt, is not bothered by Brown'
s slanders against Opus Dei and the Catholic Church. He also fails to pick
up on a crucial contradiction: how can a church criticised for Mariolatry be
said to have suppressed the 'divine feminine' in Christian teaching?
However, Ehrman is right that the novel's success may stimulate a wider
interest in the history of the early Church and even for those who have not
read The Da Vinci Code I would recommend this book.

Codex Bezae and the Da Vinci Code
A textcritical look at the Rennes-le-Chateau hoax

http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/Rennes/